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The Long Emergency

Posted By: WCF
Date: 4/20/05 10:37 p.m.

Excerpted from Rolling Stone magazine
>

The Long Emergency

What's going to happen as we start running out of
cheap gas to guzzle?
By JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER
>
> A few weeks ago, the price of oil ratcheted above fifty-five dollars a
barrel, which is about twenty dollars a barrel more than a year ago. The
next day, the oil story was buried on page six of the New York Times
business section. Apparently, the price of oil is not considered significant news, even when it goes up five bucks a barrel in the span of ten days. That same day, the stock market shot up
more than a hundred points because, CNN said, government data showed no
signs of inflation. Note to clueless nation: Call planet Earth.
>
Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology,famously remarked that
"people cannot stand too much reality." What you're about to read may
challenge your assumptions about the kind of world
we live in, and especially the kind of world into which events are
propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.
>
It has been very hard for Americans -- lost in dark raptures of nonstop
infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring -- to make
sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of
everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist
attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call
this coming time the Long Emergency.
>
Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no
exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life -- not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights,inexpensive clothing,
recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery,national defense -- you
name it.
>
The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don't have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.
>
> The term "global oil-production peak" means that a turning point will
come when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given year and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline. It is usually represented graphically in a bell curve. The peak is the top of the curve, the halfway point of the world's all-time total endowment, meaning half the world's oil will be left. That seems like a lot of oil, and it is, but there's a big catch: It's the half that is much more difficult to extract, far more costly to get, of much poorer quality and located mostly in places where the people hate us. A substantial amount of it will never be extracted.
>
> The United States passed its own oil peak -- about 11 million barrels a
day -- in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004 it ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from
natural-gas condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now. That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will continue to worsen.
>
> The U.S. peak in 1970 brought on a portentous change in geoeconomic
power. Within a few years, foreign producers,chiefly OPEC, were setting
the price of oil, and this in turn led to the oil crises of the 1970s.
In response, frantic development of non-OPEC oil,especially the North
Sea fields of England and Norway, essentially saved the West's ass for
about two decades. Since 1999, these fields have entered depletion.
Meanwhile, worldwide discovery of new oil has steadily declined to
insignificant levels in 2003 and 2004.
>
> Some "cornucopians" claim that the Earth has something like a creamy
nougat center of "abiotic" oil that will naturally replenish the great oil fields of the world. The facts speakdifferently. There has been no replacement whatsoever of oil already extracted from the fields of
America or any other place.
>
> Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates
of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and
2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India
shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves,
and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite
promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time
global peak production.
>
> It will change everything about how we live.
>
To aggravate matters, American natural-gas
> production is also declining,
> at five percent a year, despite frenetic new
> drilling, and with the
> potential of much steeper declines ahead. Because of
> the oil crises of
> the 1970s, the nuclear-plant disasters at Three Mile
> Island and
> Chernobyl and the acid-rain problem, the U.S. chose
> to make gas its
> first choice for electric-power generation. The
> result was that just
> about every power plant built after 1980 has to run
> on gas. Half the
> homes in America are heated with gas. To further
> complicate matters, gas
> isn't easy to import. Here in North America, it is
> distributed through a
> vast pipeline network. Gas imported from overseas
> would have to be
> compressed at minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit in
> pressurized tanker ships
> and unloaded (re-gasified) at special terminals, of
> which few exist in
> America. Moreover, the first attempts to site new
> terminals have met
> furious opposition because they are such ripe
> targets for terrorism.
>
> Some other things about the global energy
> predicament are poorly
> understood by the public and even our leaders. This
> is going to be a
> permanent energy crisis, and these energy problems
> will synergize with
> the disruptions of climate change, epidemic disease
> and population
> overshoot to produce higher orders of trouble.
>
> We will have to accommodate ourselves to
> fundamentally changed conditions.
>
> No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to
> run American life
> the way we have been used to running it, or even a
> substantial fraction
> of it. The wonders of steady technological progress
> achieved through the
> reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of
> Jiminy Cricket
> syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that
> anything we wish for
> hard enough will come true. These days, even people
> who ought to know
> better are wishing ardently for a seamless
> transition from fossil fuels
> to their putative replacements.
>
> The widely touted "hydrogen economy" is a
> particularly cruel hoax. We
> are not going to replace the U.S. automobile and
> truck fleet with
> vehicles run on fuel cells. For one thing, the
> current generation of
> fuel cells is largely designed to run on hydrogen
> obtained from natural
> gas. The other way to get hydrogen in the quantities
> wished for would be
> electrolysis of water using power from hundreds of
> nuclear plants. Apart
> from the dim prospect of our building that many
> nuclear plants soon
> enough, there are also numerous severe problems with
> hydrogen's nature
> as an element that present forbidding obstacles to
> its use as a
> replacement for oil and gas, especially in storage
> and transport.
>
> Wishful notions about rescuing our way of life with
> "renewables" are
> also unrealistic. Solar-electric systems and wind
> turbines face not only
> the enormous problem of scale but the fact that the
> components require
> substantial amounts of energy to manufacture and the
> probability that
> they can't be manufactured at all without the
> underlying support
> platform of a fossil-fuel economy. We will surely
> use solar and wind
> technology to generate some electricity for a period
> ahead but probably
> at a very local and small scale.
>
> Virtually all "biomass" schemes for using plants to
> create liquid fuels
> cannot be scaled up to even a fraction of the level
> at which things are
> currently run. What's more, these schemes are
> predicated on using oil
> and gas "inputs" (fertilizers, weed-killers) to grow
> the biomass crops
> that would be converted into ethanol or bio-diesel
> fuels. This is a net
> energy loser -- you might as well just burn the
> inputs and not bother
> with the biomass products. Proposals to distill
> trash and waste into oil
> by means of thermal depolymerization depend on the
> huge waste stream
> produced by a cheap oil and gas economy in the first
> place.
>
> Coal is far less versatile than oil and gas, extant
> in less abundant
> supplies than many people assume and fraught with
> huge ecological
> drawbacks -- as a contributor to greenhouse "global
> warming" gases and
> many health and toxicity issues ranging from
> widespread mercury
> poisoning to acid rain. You can make synthetic oil
> from coal, but the
> only time this was tried on a large scale was by the
> Nazis under wartime
> conditions, using impressive amounts of slave labor.
>
> If we wish to keep the lights on in America after
> 2020, we may indeed
> have to resort to nuclear power, with all its
> practical problems and
> eco-conundrums. Under optimal conditions, it could
> take ten years to get
> a new generation of nuclear power plants into
> operation, and the price
> may be beyond our means. Uranium is also a resource
> in finite supply. We
> are no closer to the more difficult project of
> atomic fusion, by the
> way, than we were in the 1970s.
>
> The upshot of all this is that we are entering a
> historical period of
> potentially great instability, turbulence and
> hardship. Obviously,
> geopolitical maneuvering around the world's richest
> energy regions has
> already led to war and promises more international
> military conflict.
> Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the
> world's remaining oil
> supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to
> stabilize the region by,
> in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The
> intent was not just
> to secure Iraq's oil but to modify and influence the
> behavior of
> neighboring states around the Persian Gulf,
> especially Iran and Saudi
> Arabia. The results have been far from entirely
> positive, and our future
> prospects in that part of the world are not
> something we can feel
> altogether confident about.
>
> And then there is the issue of China, which, in
> 2004, became the world's
> second-greatest consumer of oil, surpassing Japan.
> China's surging
> industrial growth has made it increasingly dependent
> on the imports we
> are counting on. If China wanted to, it could easily
> walk into some of
> these places -- the Middle East, former Soviet
> republics in central Asia
> -- and extend its hegemony by force. Is America
> prepared to contest for
> this oil in an Asian land war with the Chinese army?
> I doubt it. Nor can
> the U.S. military occupy regions of the Eastern
> Hemisphere indefinitely,
> or hope to secure either the terrain or the oil
> infrastructure of one
> distant, unfriendly country after another. A likely
> scenario is that the
> U.S. could exhaust and bankrupt itself trying to do
> this, and be forced
> to withdraw back into our own hemisphere, having
> lost access to most of
> the world's remaining oil in the process.
>
> We know that our national leaders are hardly
> uninformed about this
> predicament. President George W. Bush has been
> briefed on the dangers of
> the oil-peak situation as long ago as before the
> 2000 election and
> repeatedly since then. In March, the Department of
> Energy released a
> report that officially acknowledges for the first
> time that peak oil is
> for real and states plainly that "the world has
> never faced a problem
> like this. Without massive mitigation more than a
> decade before the
> fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be
> temporary."
>
> Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to
> make other
> arrangements for the way we live in the United
> States. America is in a
> special predicament due to a set of unfortunate
> choices we made as a
> society in the twentieth century. Perhaps the worst
> was to let our towns
> and cities rot away and to replace them with
> suburbia, which had the
> additional side effect of trashing a lot of the best
> farmland in
> America. Suburbia will come to be regarded as the
> greatest misallocation
> of resources in the history of the world. It has a
> tragic destiny. The
> psychology of previous investment suggests that we
> will defend our
> drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible
> liability.
>
> Before long, the suburbs will fail us in practical
> terms. We made the
> ongoing development of housing subdivisions, highway
> strips, fried-food
> shacks and shopping malls the basis of our economy,
> and when we have to
> stop making more of those things, the bottom will
> fall out.
>
> The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require
> us to downscale and
> re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do
> it, from the kind of
> communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow
> our food to the way
> we work and trade the products of our work. Our
> lives will become
> profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be
> far less about
> mobility and much more about staying where you are.
> Anything organized
> on the large scale, whether it is government or a
> corporate business
> enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the
> cheap energy props that
> support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the
> Long Emergency will
> produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these
> will be members of
> an angry and aggrieved former middle class.
>
> Food production is going to be an enormous problem
> in the Long
> Emergency. As industrial agriculture fails due to a
> scarcity of oil- and
> gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow
> more of our food closer
> to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. The
> American economy of
> the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on
> agriculture, not
> information, not high tech, not "services" like real
> estate sales or
> hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming. This is
> no doubt a
> startling, radical idea, and it raises extremely
> difficult questions
> about the reallocation of land and the nature of
> work. The relentless
> subdividing of land in the late twentieth century
> has destroyed the
> contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in
> most places. The
> process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and
> improvisational.
> Food production will necessarily be much more
> labor-intensive than it
> has been for decades. We can anticipate the
> re-formation of a
> native-born American farm-laboring class. It will be
> composed largely of
> the aforementioned economic losers who had to
> relinquish their grip on
> the American dream. These masses of disentitled
> people may enter into
> quasi-feudal social relations with those who own
> land in exchange for
> food and physical security. But their sense of
> grievance will remain
> fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that
> land.
>
> The way that commerce is currently organized in
> America will not survive
> far into the Long Emergency. Wal-Mart's "warehouse
> on wheels" won't be
> such a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy. The
> national chain stores'
> 12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines could easily
> be interrupted by
> military contests over oil and by internal conflict
> in the nations that
> have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured
> goods, because
> they, too, will be struggling with similar issues of
> energy famine and
> all the disorders that go with it.
>
> As these things occur, America will have to make
> other arrangements for
> the manufacture, distribution and sale of ordinary
> goods. They will
> probably be made on a "cottage industry" basis
> rather than the factory
> system we once had, since the scale of available
> energy will be much
> lower -- and we are not going to replay the
> twentieth century. Tens of
> thousands of the common products we enjoy today,
> from paints to
> pharmaceuticals, are made out of oil. They will
> become increasingly
> scarce or unavailable. The selling of things will
> have to be reorganized
> at the local scale. It will have to be based on
> moving merchandise
> shorter distances. It is almost certain to result in
> higher costs for
> the things we buy and far fewer choices.
>
> The automobile will be a diminished presence in our
> lives, to say the
> least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention
> tax revenue, our
> roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway
> system is more delicate
> than the public realizes. If the "level of service"
> (as traffic
> engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest
> degree, problems
> multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not
> tolerate partial
> failure. The interstates are either in excellent
> condition, or they
> quickly fall apart.
>
> America today has a railroad system that the
> Bulgarians would be ashamed
> of. Neither of the two major presidential candidates
> in 2004 mentioned
> railroads, but if we don't refurbish our rail
> system, then there may be
> no long-range travel or transport of goods at all a
> few decades from
> now. The commercial aviation industry, already on
> its knees financially,
> is likely to vanish. The sheer cost of maintaining
> gigantic airports may
> not justify the operation of a much-reduced
> air-travel fleet. Railroads
> are far more energy efficient than cars, trucks or
> airplanes, and they
> can be run on anything from wood to electricity. The
> rail-bed
> infrastructure is also far more economical to
> maintain than our highway
> network.
>
> The successful regions in the twenty-first century
> will be the ones
> surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can
> reconstitute locally
> sustainable economies on an armature of civic
> cohesion. Small towns and
> smaller cities have better prospects than the big
> cities, which will
> probably have to contract substantially. The process
> will be painful and
> tumultuous. In many American cities, such as
> Cleveland, Detroit and St.
> Louis, that process is already well advanced. Others
> have further to
> fall. New York and Chicago face extraordinary
> difficulties, being
> oversupplied with gigantic buildings out of scale
> with the reality of
> declining energy supplies. Their former agricultural
> hinterlands have
> long been paved over. They will be encysted in a
> surrounding fabric of
> necrotic suburbia that will only amplify and
> reinforce the cities'
> problems. Still, our cities occupy important sites.
> Some kind of urban
> entities will exist where they are in the future,
> but probably not the
> colossi of twentieth-century industrialism.
>
> Some regions of the country will do better than
> others in the Long
> Emergency. The Southwest will suffer in proportion
> to the degree that it
> prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late
> twentieth century. I
> predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada
> will become
> significantly depopulated, since the region will be
> short of water as
> well as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix
> without cheap air
> conditioning.
>
> I'm not optimistic about the Southeast, either, for
> different reasons. I
> think it will be subject to substantial levels of
> violence as the
> grievances of the formerly middle class boil over
> and collide with the
> delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The
> latent encoded
> behavior of Southern culture includes an outsized
> notion of
> individualism and the belief that firearms ought to
> be used in the
> defense of it. This is a poor recipe for civic
> cohesion.
>
> The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an
> array of problems,
> from poor farming potential to water shortages to
> population loss. The
> Pacific Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest
> have somewhat
> better prospects. I regard them as less likely to
> fall into lawlessness,
> anarchy or despotism and more likely to salvage the
> bits and pieces of
> our best social traditions and keep them in
> operation at some level.
>
> These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The
> Long Emergency is
> going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race.
> We will not believe
> that this is happening to us, that 200 years of
> modernity can be brought
> to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The
> survivors will have to
> cultivate a religion of hope -- that is, a deep and
> comprehensive belief
> that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is any
> positive side to
> stark changes coming our way, it may be in the
> benefits of close
> communal relations, of having to really work
> intimately (and physically)
> with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that
> really matters and
> to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments
> instead of being
> merely entertained to avoid boredom. Years from now,
> when we hear
> singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will
> sing with our whole
> hearts.
>
> Adapted from The Long Emergency, 2005, by James
> Howard Kunstler, and
> reprinted with permission of the publisher,
> Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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